August 27, 2007

Final week’s swimming - very light as everyone was chasing me out of the pool.

Swimming weather at Dover been good, and some of the world’s top open water swimmers have been posting mid-boggling times, in particular Peter Stoychev from (Bulgaria - 6h57mins - see photo & map below) and Yuriy Kudinov (Russia -7h06mins).

August 22, 2007

Wrapped up last week of training at home with the usual Sunday 1.6km swim at Camps Bay in 14.5 degree water, and then went accross to the 50m Pavillion pool and did a quick 1 km lapping spot on target tempo of 1min 40 per 100m. That tempo equates to 10h00 for the Channel, which some of the best South African swimmers like Steve Klugman and John Dickerson have done - feed breaks, tides, weather etc all included. Me - I’m just aiming to finish the swim this time. Some sunshine & conditions where I can see a coast - any coast - would be nice!

August 14, 2007

I now know that my watch can count up to 100 laps! I was sick & tired of swimming 1km blocks, so on Saturday I went to the gym & swam 150 x 50m concentrating specifically on technique.

Now just one more solid weeks’ training & then can start to taper. Cecilia & I fly to UK middle next week - business class courtesy of a years’ travel miles accumulated mostly by Cecilia. We spend a night in London with our friends Amanda & Mark, and then off down to Dover on Friday morning.

Barend has a SportsTrack handheld real-time tracking unit on loan from local swimming enthusiast (the understatement of the season) Ram Barkai. This will be on Barend’s boat, and should enable us to follow his swimming progress real-time on the web. I will post logon etc details as I receive them. See www.sportstrack.net

July 30, 2007

I ran into a wall on Monday evening (figuratively - don’t do much real running these days), and so backed right off for the rest of the week. I was due a light week next week, so deceided to take the superundercompensation right now (see comment by Mairi Brimble 2006 07 30). Hopefully I will be able to pick up condition by the end of the week.

July 23, 2007

Training consistency has been good for the last few weeks. I’ve been comfortable doing the bulk of the work in the 1st half of the week - two sessions daily from Monday to Thursday but all alone - no more squad work - and am about to start an easy 30 min sea swim on both Saturday & Sunday to get the reflexes accustomed to the less stable sea swimming.

As mentioned in some of the earlier posts, I have spend a lot of time adjusting my stroke to swim more efficiently. Even though I’m now comfortably holding last years milage & speed, I now feel a lot less tired in the mornings & less sore in the shoulders. Together with my twice-weekly 30 minute massages from Lindsey at the Sports Science Physio Centre I’m now feeling so good that I’m starting to wonder whether I’m training hard enough!

However the UK weather is making sure that I don’t get too confident - the bad weather & floods there have seen a number of swimmers return home without even getting a swim.

June 26, 2007

I got to the Pavilion on a rainy windy Sunday morning to find 65 year-old Paul L’Anterme had beaten me to the pool, so snapped a pic with my cell phone camera. The following week Paul, an ex national lifesaving champion from Durban (very warm water), completed his first Robben Island - Blouwberg 7.5km swim, making him one of only three over 60’s to have completed the swim.

Looking back at last years’ training (extreme left of graph above), the big load was in June, with consecutive weeks of 32km, 25km & 35km but very little after that. In fact during the 8 weeks training before my actual crossing attempt only 2 weeks included training distance over 20km. While there were contribututory factors to this, in retrospect I cannot help thinking that that exceeds the boundaries of a reasonable taper by an absurd amount.

June 1, 2007

The month started well, with 60km in the 1st three weeks, but ended with a week overseas & a week with sinusitis on my return.

The photo on the right was taken near Lake Geneva (fountain in background) after six South African hedge fund management businesses attended very slick Capital Introduction events in London and Geneva, arranged by Jon Baker and the extremely efficient Credit-Suisse Prime Services team.